The final
edition had hit the streets, and the newsroom at the News-Sentinel was down to
night staff: The news editor, the wire service men in their own cubicles, a
copy boy, me on the copy desk, editing teletype stories and wondering if the baby-sitter
would get my note about dinner.
Across the
room, a phone rang. In a few minutes, Ralph Millett, the news editor, came
toward me, looking all around, waving a piece of newsprint. “You need to go
interview this girl in Lenoir City,” he said. “She’s Bobby Baker’s secretary,
visiting her parents for Christmas.”
“Me?” I
asked. I wasn’t a reporter any more. “I don’t have anybody else to send,” he
said. “Jack will drive you. Jack!” he called.
“What’s
this about?” I asked.
“Scandal at
a high level. Nobody has said a word so far.” Then looking at me under his
bushy eyebrows, he said in the best Hollywood newspaper-movie fashion, “Get
that story.”
Early in
1963, Bobby Baker, a protégé of Lyndon
Johnson and a major power on Capitol Hill, had come under investigation by the
Senate Rules Committee for allegations of bribery and arranging sexual favors
in exchange for congressional votes and government contracts. FBI chief J.
Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were involved peripherally in
the investigation, as was Johnson himself, though the vice president’s name was
dropped from the inquiry after John F. Kennedy’s assassination November 22,
1963.
Carole
Tyler, Tennessean and former Miss Loudon County, was Bobby Baker’s personal
secretary and lived in a house owned by Baker in Washington.
I had Jack
stop at a drugstore on the 30-minute drive to Carole’s parents’ home. I bought
holiday boxes, giftwrap and ribbon, made up several cheerful-looking packages,
only hesitated a moment once we arrived at a modest-looking house in Lenoir
City.
Since I
looked for all the world like a friend bearing gifts, when I asked for Carole
at the door, a relative let me in. A pretty but tired-looking woman in a satin
dressing gown came out of a back room,
accompanied by a little dog that immediately jumped on me.
“Kukla!”
the woman scolded.
“Ah,” I
said. “A Greek name. It means ‘doll,’ you know.”
“Who are
you, anyway?” the woman asked.
“Carole?” I
asked. She nodded.
“I’m from
the Knoxville paper.”
“Oh, no.
No, no.”
“You don’t
really have to say anything,” I said quickly. I put the fake presents down and
showed her that I wasn’t carrying a note pad or pen. “We just wanted to see how
you’re doing with all this.” She sank on to a sofa nearby and picked up the
little dog.
After a
half hour or so, I went out with my empty Christmas boxes and got into the
staff car. “No way to get a picture?” Jack asked. “No, I don’t think so,” I
said. Jack drove fast while I wrote down everything I could remember that
Carole had said.
One thing
she told me, wistfully, was how she had posed for repair work on the model for
the 19-foot-tall statue of Freedom that stands atop the Capitol building. “So
it will have my arms,” she said.
Even though
it wasn’t hard news, the story got lots of attention because of the seedy
nature of the investigation and the way the principals had been so
closed-mouthed about the whole thing. It was on the front page of the
News-Sentinel with a picture of Carole in front of the Capitol (you could
barely see that there was a statue atop the building.) The Associated Press
picked it up and Newsweek mentioned it, along with my name. There was a bonus
in my paycheck that week.
The
Journal, our rival newspaper, complained on its own front page that a spokesman
denied Carole had given an interview. (We had gone through elaborate steps to
hide the story until it was in print, since the two newspapers used the same
technical crew.)
“You were
really there, right?” the news editor asked me. “Of course I was,” I said. And
Jack, who had waited outside in the car, verified that he saw me go in the
house and stay a half hour or so.
On the strength of the mention in
Newsweek, I took the Greyhound to New York City and applied for a job on the
Herald-Tribune. Managing Editor Murray Weiss had seen the story. He said I
would be the Tribune’s first woman copy editor.
But the job never materialized. I
moved to New York, but there was a newspaper strike, a hiring freeze, the
Tribune was in trouble…and I took a much tamer writing job at one of the United
Nations delegations, researching puff stories at the New York public library.
In February
of 1964, Carole Tyler was questioned at the Senate hearing. She took the Fifth
on every question. Never said a word. In May, 1965, she was killed when a
single-engine biplane in which she was a passenger crashed into five feet of
water only 200 yards off the Maryland coast.
I still
feel guilty about manipulating my way into the woman’s house with my fake
Christmas presents. It’s the sort of thing a paparazzo might do without a
second thought, but I was (and am) mild-mannered and anxious not to offend. I
can’t even imagine where the idea of the wrapped boxes came from. I think it
was probably a matter of my being more afraid of the news editor than I was of
tricking an unknown woman. A woman who died at 26 years of age. A woman whose
arms are replicated on the statue of Freedom.
